Leadership Beyond Boundaries Maps New Terrain

CCL conducted a second GVOL Leadership Beyond Boundaries (LBB) train-the-trainer (ToT) program at its Greensboro campus in late June/early July, 2008.

Twelve teachers, trainers, and coaches from the US, India, and Caribbean attended the training to learn a new two-day program titled Leadership Essentials and absorb the CCL way of facilitating leadership development. The new trainers then delivered the two-day Essentials program to nearly 60 participants from the local community via 5 concurrent programs the following week.

The Leadership Essentials model is designed to be a leadership program that can be delivered at a low cost and with minimal amenities. It uses self-score instruments rather than 360-degree assessments and flipcharts in place of PowerPoint. The participants in the ToT program plan to use the Essentials model to provide leadership development to people in nonprofits, government, schools, churches, and prisons.

The LBB program is one of a number of CCL initiatives that are designed to make leadership development more affordable and accessible. The LBB program will be delivered by CCL in Ethiopia in July and in India in August.

For the program flyer: http://www.ccl.org/leadership/pdf/LBBflyer.pdf

Early Leadership Development in Sri Lanka – Preparing for What’s Possible

By Joel Wright

In March 2008 I returned to Sri Lanka where from 2004 – 2005 I worked with the National Council of YMCAs to design and deliver various leadership programs. During that first trip, the Indian Ocean tsunami rushed ashore and as a result, several of the young adults I was training were tapped into regional leadership positions to assist in the recovery and community rebuilding efforts. Part of the goal for the return trip in March was to explore and better understand the impact that early leadership training had in the face of responding to a crisis. The other focus of my trip was to continue CCL’s Global Voices of Leadership effort of developing and testing leadership content that could become curriculum for our early leadership development effort.

The first leadership program conducted was a one day program that translated some of CCL’s core content: Direction Alignment Commitment (DAC) and Assessment Challenge Support (ACS). Typically used with executives around the world, DAC & ACS was adapted to youth friendly scenarios and examples making it understandable and relevant to this younger audience. Additionally, this day program included CCL’s Active Listening guidebook which was converted into curriculum and used as a piece of the program. While the program went extremely well there were some good lessons learned about better ways to facilitate when content is being translated into another language. Overall, the program was a success and I must say I’m always amazed at how eager Sri Lankan youth are to learn and engage. To me it speaks to how much they are craving these types of developmental opportunities.

As is often the case when I’ve traveled as a leadership trainer, people often spring requests on me, could you run an impromptu program for a group of about twenty youth? It’s why we’re here, is usually my response because to deny these young people an opportunity to grow towards their potential just doesn’t feel right. As a result I found myself working with my wife and two of her fellow public health graduate students conducting a last second program that combined the YMCA’s motto of spirit, mind and body with leadership for life. The combination proved potent with one young Sri Lankan sharing, “I think it’s very useful to my future life so I think now I’m a perfect person.” Since sharing this statement around CCL one colleague said, “Perfecting people in 3 hours! Awesome.”

While every portion of this trip to Sri Lanka proved to be powerful perhaps the biggest surprise was in reconnecting with those young professionals whom I trained prior to the tsunami and hearing about the impact those early trainings had on them. As I listened and collected stories and experiences about the tsunami, it became increasingly clear that each of the four young professionals “tapped” into leadership positions, cited their early leadership training as important in helping them fill their role, connect and collaborate with everyone from local community members to the multiple different organizations, agencies and individuals who came in from all over the world. Such a unanimous response pointing to parts of their leadership training was indeed quite a surprise and nearly everyone interviewed discussed the importance of developing future leadership at the grassroots level.

In talking about the impact of leadership training with many different people in Sri Lanka, I often asked the question, what role would leadership training have on youth around the country? Many responded with similar answers such as “youth need this” or it would be the “best thing” in the midst of their situation.

It’s stories of impact and hope such as these that we at CCL continue to hear about around the world and that drive us to ask, what would the world look like if more or even all youth could have access to leadership opportunities? Perhaps we let one Sri Lankan youth answer this for us, “it would enable youth to work on improving all aspects of our society.”

Walking New Roads

Debra Millar of CHF is profiled in an article in CCL's 2008 annual report. Debra reflects on her
22 years of working in the area of public health and HIV/AIDS prevention in Kenya and other African countries and on the importance of leadership development:

"It ’s very clear to me that the most impactful wave of assistance needs to be in the form of leadership development. These young, dedicated leaders can change the face of their countries," says Debra, while acknowledging that the stakes are high."If sound ethical leadership doesn ’t develop in a typical for-profit organization, it doesn ’t make as much money, or it goes out of business. But if we fail to develop ethical leadership in troubled regions,the consequences are far, far greater."

CHF International, a global non-governmental organization (NGO) that is currenly collaborating with CCL to build leadership to reduce ethnic conflict and address HIV/AIDS in Kenya.

CCL Takes Leadership Essentials to Emerging Countries

The Center for Creative Leadership's Leading Effectively newsletter features a piece on the GVOL effort that is the focus of this blog.

It states:

"The Center for Creative Leadership works with some 20,000 people each year. But what would it take to bring leadership development to 2 million or 20 million people? And what if CCL expanded beyond developing senior-level executives and sought to develop young people? And what could CCL do to reach out to develop leaders in emerging economies such as Africa, India and China?"

Read more at: http://www.ccl.org/leadership/enewsletter/2008/JUNemerging.aspx

Train-the-Trainer Programs Scheduled for Grassroots Leadership Development

CCL will be hosting additional runs of the Leadership Beyond Boundaries train-the-trainer program in the US, Ethiopia, and India. The program is to provide NGO, not -for-profit institutions and community leadership trainers with essential knowledge and skills to facilitate a leadership development program for underserved populations.

The 8-day program encompasses three major components:

• Experience leadership development: Exposure to Leadership Essentials -- a leadership development model developed for NGOs, not -for profit and educational institutions.
• Learn how to facilitate leadership development: Training in the Center for Creative Leadership’s model of leadership development grounded in the Center’s four decades of leadership development experience. Covers content knowledge and facilitations skills development using a methodology used to train CCL faculty known as The CCL Way.
• Practice delivery of a leadership development program: The program is capped by a training session in which the trainer delivers Leadership Essentials to a live audience with active CCL support and feedback

The scheduled dates are:

• USA – June 23 – July 2, 2008
• Ethiopia – July 14 – 23, 2008 *
• India – August 25 - Sept. 3, 2008 *

Inquiries can be directed to Dou Fall (falld@ccl.org)

A Train-the-Trainer Workshop for NGOs

CCL hosted our first Leadership Beyond Boundaries Train-the-Trainer Program on February 11-22, 2008 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Participants from Cherokee Gives Back, CHF, IntraHealth, LEAP Africa, TISS, UWI, and World Vision traveled from Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, the Caribbean, India, and North America to attend the program.

The program was prompted by NGO client requests for facilitation training to be provided along with leadership development content and tools. For the program we used an approach known as the CCL Way, a methodology used to prepare new CCL trainers in facilitation techniques and the core concepts that form CCL's approach to leadership development. In addition, the training included orientation to assessments and coaching, and modules and exercises related to change, conflict, decision-style, and influence.

The two week pilot program provided valuable learning for both CCL and the participants. The Center plans to offer future workshops in Africa and India.

Coaching and Social Change: An Experience with Ashoka in Egypt

David Dorn and Mike Rosenthal, two coaches from the Center, conducted a coaching session for a group of Ashoka Fellows and staff in Cairo. Ashoka is an organization designed to advance social entrepreneurship. Ashoka Fellows work in some 60 countries to address a wide spectrum of human need and social challenges.

The coaching session was intended to share our coaching approach and gather input on coaching skills development for grassroots leaders. The CCL coaching approach of asking questions rather than offering solutions resonated deeply with the Ashoka participants. They indicated that solutions to be successful must emerge from the people and can't be imposed from up or the outside.

This is a key idea. In India and elsewhere we've noted that the NGOs that are able to achieve scale are the ones that espouse inclusion within their organizations and in their engagements with the community. The leaders of these organizations understand that gifted individuals can be catalysts but change takes collective action. Change agents may be more effective when they act as coaches and facilitators rather than consultants and experts.

The experience with Ashoka was a powerful and an inspiring experience for the two CCL coaches. They were moved by nature of the diffcult challenges Ashoka Fellows take on in Egypt as well as their unique spirit and creative orientation to social problems. Insights from the Ashoka experience have helped inform our efforts with regard to NGO and community leadership development.

Liberia Women’s Empowerment Colloquium

Karen Dyer, Shera Johnson-Clark, and Dou Fall of CCL conducted leadership workshops in Liberia as part of the Women’s Empowerment Colloquium. The objective of this initiative, envisioned by Republic of Liberia President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, is to empower women at various levels to become effective leaders and make a difference qualitatively on issues at national and international levels.

Approximate thirty-five (35) women and three (3) men attended the CCL workshop. Represented in this group were community/NGO leaders, governmental leaders, colloquium steering committee members, and leadership consultants.

CCL has been involved in constructing the leadership dimensions of this global initiative. We are excited about working to develop new and transformative models for developing the leadership capacity of women leaders in Liberia and beyond.

Boundary Spanning Leadership

by Christopher Ernst

In his recent Newsweek article What People Will Die For, the influential columnist Fareed Zakaria wrote about a growing global phenomenon – the persistence and intensification of the boundaries between subnational groups. With the waning influence of the battle of ideology (liberalism, communism, socialism), humans’ oldest identities have moved to the core of intergroup relations. In Pakistan, the societal rift that most deeply envelopes the life and loss of Benazir Bhutto is the divide between the country’s various regions. In Kenya, the tragic events associated with the recent election stem from a break-down along tribal lines. In Iraq, intractable divisions of religion continue to stall efforts toward a more peaceful future.

While the pull of old identities is currently most visible in developing nations, Zakaria notes that this trend is alive and well in the developed world. While Belgium went six months without a government because of the harsh divisions between Flemish and French speaking populations, Scotland elected a party whose central platform pivots on independence, seeking to unhinge the 1707 Acts of Union that established the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, and Wales.

Leadership research and practice has traditionally focused on the need for leaders to manage and protect group boundaries. As the events Zakaria describe make clear, the opposite response is increasingly called for – the ability for leaders to reach across, span, bridge, and bring groups together across boundaries.

Through the Leadership Across Differences project, (http://www.ccl.org/leadership/research/lad/index.aspx_), CCL is currently seeking to understand the increasingly important and necessary role that boundary spanning leaders play in bridging divides between groups in service of a larger vision, mission, or goal.

Critical challenges in Pakistan, Kenya, or Iraq will not be solved by leaders working only within a single identity group. Likewise, this holds true for any of the most pressing issues of today including poverty, education, human rights, healthcare, and the environment. The implication for leadership is this – as ancient identities work to pull groups apart, the role of leadership will increasingly be to create the context and space for these groups to come together. When group boundaries are successfully bridged, pent-up breakthroughs and innovations are unleashed. This is both the challenge and the opportunity for boundary spanning leadership.

Organizational Leadership Development in Ethiopia Among NGOs

Update from Steadman Harrison

The CCL Leadership Essentials Workshop content begins with an individual leader focus and moves quickly to broaden an organizational leadership development lens. In prototype workshops conducted in East Africa from November 2006 through January 2008, experiential exercises were used to draw out the lessons and best practices regarding working with others. Trust Walks, Move the Mindset/Money, and Visual/Metaphor Explorer are a few of the tools we thread together in the Assessment/Challenge/Support (ACS) framework to address organizational leadership development. Participants are asked to think beyond their own personality and learning styles to consider the organizational culture and community context where they work.

In a recent workshop with nearly 100 participants from Ethiopian NGOs, CBOs, and FBOs a group of 10 volunteers took on the role of managers, 10 blind-folded participants took on the role of employees, 25 observers shared the perspective of the rest of the organization, 25 observers shared the perspective of the local community in need, and 25 observers played the role of the local, province and regional government ministries. As the managers and employees worked through a simple task to move a physical object representing NGO funding out from a fixed point to a nearby circle representing the community in need, the observers noted in the debrief how easy it was for those focused on the task to lose sight of their purpose and to literally forget about the community they were serving. Managers missed opportunities to engage with the rest of the organization available for support and complained about the challenge of working with government representatives when new rules and regulations were being communicated. During the debrief of experiential exercises and appreciative inquiry tools participants routinely draw the parallels to their everyday work and see the analogies and metaphors of these simulations come to life. Participants report that their understanding of their impact on others, their appreciation for the complex cultural context within which they work, and the importance of building clear direction, alignment, and commitment through their leadership influence increases throughout the course of their workshop experience.

Leadership for the BoP and the Bottom Line

By Philomena Rego and Lyndon Rego

On our trip to India in December 2007, we met with several corporations, educational institutions, trainers and young professionals. Most inspiring was our meeting with KC Kurien, who heads the people diversity initiatives at Pantaloon. Pantaloon Retail (India) Limited, is India’s leading retailer with more than 500 stores in 51 cities across India and over 25,000 people. What’s especially noteworthy is that the majority of employees come from lower economic groups. Organized retail is emerging as an important source of jobs in India, and is expected to add 2.5 million jobs by 2010. We found Pantaloon’s training approach to be remarkable on a number of levels:

1. While the war for talent in India is aimed at attracting the best educated, Pantaloon’s employees are typically young people from slums who might not have a degree, but have aspirations like everyone else.
2. Their innovative approach centers around helping these individuals be successful and providing opportunities and resources for developing their self-esteem and aspirations for their life and work. They ask recruits “what is your dream?”
3. The training approach is holistic and extends beyond building skills needed to fulfill job requirements to encompass the overall well being of the employee. They provide parenting classes, continuing education, and even have a happiness index to gauge overall employee satisfaction.

We asked KC, who came to Pantaloon after heading the design school Shristi, how he developed this unique orientation. He said he gained insights from watching beggars at a traffic intersection and reflecting on why some beggars were more successful than others. He found that it had to do with self-confidence. KC’s stint with design enables him to look at developing people with fresh eyes and to try new approaches.

Pantaloon’s parent organization is the Future Group, led by the visionary Kishore Biyani. The organization’s manifesto speaks of “rewriting rules” and “creating the future” and identifies among its core values: leadership, building relationships, humility, introspection, openness, and adaptability.

The link that Pantaloon has traced between individual self-awareness / empowerment and organizational success is at the heart of the Center’s vision to make leadership development more accessible and available in our world. Pantaloon -- and the aptly named Future Group --provides an inspirational example of how we can create a brighter future for those at the bottom of the pyramid through leadership development.

Learning to Lead

By Philomena Rego

As a social worker educated in India, I had been through a graduate program where field placement was a requirement. At the time, only a few institutions were doing internships and fieldwork but now these approaches are commonplace in colleges as a way of providing students with practical experience.

Looking back, I gained work exposure and the application of theory to practice from the fieldwork, but the experience produced little insight about myself and my ability to work with others. It was ultimately of little long-term value.

In returning to India with an eye for ways to make leadership development possible for young people, it occurs to me that these field experiences are a fertile ground for building self-awareness and team skills. For this, we can couple these programs with assessment, reflection, coaching, and feedback. This would impart students with not only practical experience in their field of study, but the critical leadership skills that they can use for a lifetime.

Employers in India have complained that fresh hires arrive with a deficit of soft skills. The value of this particular approach is that with the added leadership emphasis, we could transform a common practice into a potentially powerful and valuable action learning platform.

We’ve begun discussions with a couple of Indian colleges to work to prototype an action learning approach for students. If successful they may be a model that can be scaled across the educational landscape to help turn a new generation of learners into leaders.

What's at Stake in Schools

One of the organizations we’ve encountered in our effort to make leadership development more accessible in our world is the African Leadership Academy (ALA). The Academy is a new educational institution that will prepare talented 16-19 year olds from all 54 African nations to take on roles of leadership. We recently received a note from Chris Bradford of ALA spotlighting some of the incoming students. Here’s an essay from Belinda, a 16 year-old Zimbabwean girl:

“In June last year (2006), I noticed a certain family in our neighborhood constantly came to my house to literally beg for food. I was greatly disturbed and concerned at this behaviour. I investigated further into the issue and was saddened to discover that this family was child headed by Anna (13 years old). Anna, who was looking after her sisters (10 and 8 years), told me that her parents had died of AIDS in January (2006) and because all the money had been used up, she had resorted to asking for food in order to survive.

I was moved by her story and with the intention of helping, I asked my mother to lend me some money. With it I purchased 30 chickens at point of lay. I had calculated that if each chicken laid an egg everyday, I would have a crate to sell after school. I would sell the eggs to my neighbours and on Sundays I would take the eggs to church. With money constantly available I began to meet the orphans’ daily needs.”

ALA notes that Belinda has continued to empower Anna by teaching her how to grow vegetables in a garden. With the money from raised from the sales of the eggs and vegetables, Anna was able to support her daily needs and pay her siblings’ and her school fees.

Belinda’s approach evokes that of social entrepreneurship and speaks to the potential of young people. In his article, Everybody a Changemaker, Ashoka founder Bill Drayton, voiced the need to focus on developing young people so that they gain “applied empathy, teamwork, and leadership” skills. It was important he said that we include those who have traditionally been subject to the kind of education that leaves out inspiration and empowerment.

“The children of elite families grow up at home and usually in school being expected to take initiative and being rewarded for doing so. This confident ability to master new situations and initiate whatever changes or actions are needed is in essence what defines the elite. Entering adult life with confidence and mastery of empathy/teamwork/leadership skills is what ultimately has given this small group control of the initiative and therefore of power and resources for millennia.

However, the other 97 percent grow up getting very little such experience with taking initiative. Adults control the classroom, work setting, and even sports and extra-curricular activities. And this situation, coupled with society’s attitudes, drums home the message to this majority: “You’re not competent or perhaps even responsible. Please don’t try to start things; we can do it far better.”

Clearly young people like Belinda rise far above their circumstances, and ALA intends to enable them to hone their skills as agents of change. There is desperate need for many more institutions like ALA, however.

The gulf is great between their potential and the present state of education in places like rural India, spotlighted in a feature in the New York Times, where teachers seldom show up at decrepit schools and children learn little.

“Sixty years after independence, with 40 percent of its population under 18, India is now confronting the perils of its failure to educate its citizens, notably the poor. More Indian children are in school than ever before, but the quality of public schools like this one has sunk to spectacularly low levels, as government schools have become reserves of children at the very bottom of India’s social ladder.

Among children in fifth grade, 4 out of 10 could not read text at the second grade level, and 7 out of 10 could not subtract. The results reflected a slight improvement in reading from 2006 and a slight decline in arithmetic; together they underscored one of the most worrying gaps in India’s prospects for continued growth.

“When they get older, they’ll curse their teachers,” said Arnab Ghosh, 26, a social worker trying to help the government improve its schools, as he stared at clusters of children sitting on the grass outside. “They’ll say, ‘We came every day and we learned nothing.’ ”

In India, CCL is exploring the development of a leadership program for school principals. Helping school administrators to think creatively about their challenges is key but only a small part of what must happen. Ultimately, we need millions of schools to embark on the path that ALA has taken. It will take a lot of us working together at the global and local level to bring about this critical transformation.

Overcoming Want and Waste

In the last couple of months, two long awaited BOP innovations were unveiled: the One Laptop Per Child ($100) computer and the Tata Nano ($2,500) car. Both these innovations aimed at providing access to those who previously could not afford a laptop or a car.

While much of the innovation in our world is focused on pushing the forward edge in terms of features and functionality, the OLPC and the Tata Nano focused on cost cutting as the frontier for innovation. Crossing this frontier offers access to millions new consumers. The OLPC and Nano price targets were widely labeled as unrealistic at the outset but as they drew close to launch, they resulted in a bevy of copycat offerings from mainstream producers in the computer and automobile fields. What the OLPC and Nano proved is that the true barrier to be crossed is not technical viability but that of vision and will.

As more products cross the price-innovation threshold, a worry is about the significant environmental problems that can be expected to ensue with greater consumption. Finding a way to produce green (yet affordable) products is a frontier that we must begin to tackle. Here too the great, big barrier is not about feasibility but that of vision and will. Will we see creative leaders like Negroponte and Tata embark on these challenges soon? There’s not a moment to waste.

Leapfrogging the Digital Divide

I am spending the holiday break in Goa, India. We are staying in a rural area named Santana. I am pecking this out on a BlackBerry while looking out across miles of marsh, populated with frogs, swarms of birds, grazing buffalo, roving pigs, and wandering country chicken.

What's remarkable to me is that this remote area -- where there is no trash pick-up and only occassional bus service -- is quite accessible via mobile technology. While I can't buy the local paper without getting to a nearby town, I can read the New York Times just as well as anyone in New York City.

In India, people are starting to use communications technology to overcome hurdles. College courses are telecast from major universities to hubs around the country where students attend remotely, farmers are making selling decisions based on market data via Internet links, and in traffic-choked cities, telecommuting is becoming a norm. In other parts of the world, banking and money transfer services are finally feasible for millions of rural people via cell phones.

What is the potential of these technologies to make leadership development and resources more accessible? CCL is exploring a number of possibilities along this axis. I anticipate that in years to come more of us will be able to live, work, and learn just fine in places like Santana, sitting as I am right now under a coconut tree listening to the chirp of the grasshoppers.

Designing a Sustainable Future

At the Design with India conference I attended in Bangalore, Geetha Narayanan, the founder of Srishti asked, is the current economic model (that pits development against the environment) the only way forward for India. While the conference showcased the work of talented commercial designers, the role of design as a means to take on social challenges was very much front and center. How can we make sure that economic development doesn’t marginalize the poor or destroy the environment? In Bangalore, the pace of development is simply staggering. New shopping malls, office complexes, residential high-rises, and a commercial airport are all mushrooming, outpacing roads, power, and water supply. The growth is dynamic and creating prosperity, but not without unwanted side effects. The idea that design can make a difference is key.

Design thinking doesn’t assume that what’s gone before is what should be, or that problems are intractable. The ability to envision and enact fresh solutions is predicated on the belief that such solutions are possible in the first place. Poonam Kasturi is a designer who is building such solutions. She is created Daily Dump (http://www.dailydump.org/), an enterprise to support urban composting. Sixty percent of Bangalore’s urban waste is organic. Turning it into compost, reduces landfill and facilitates recycling of the non-organic waste, such as cardboard and plastic. Poonam’s solution is an elegant stack of earthen pots that can fit physically and aesthetically into small urban apartments. At Poonam’s design school, Srishti, alumni say what they learn that is the most important is the ability to think creatively. A broader challenge for India, is to increase the number of people who can think and create the kind of future we want.

The Center is working in India to increase the number of creative thinkers in an educational environment that has traditionally favored rote learning. In meetings with a number of educational institutions we’ve found a readiness to think about the role of creativity and leadership in preparing students for the future. We’ll have more to report on this front in the months to come.

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Business Takes on Poverty

Is using business practices to address poverty an idea whose time has come? One indication is that the top two gurus in the The Thinkers 50 biennial poll are C.K. Prahalad, who wrote The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, and Bill Gates who is now increasingly known for his focus on global health, development, and education. What unites these two individuals is the sense that we need new approaches to dealing with the issues of poverty.

Here’s what Gates had to say on the subject at his 2007 commencement address at Harvard University:

We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism – if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes. If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world.

Prahalad is perhaps the leading agent of this line of thinking. In his landmark book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid he argues:

For more than 50 years, the World Bank, donor nations, various aid agencies, national governments, and lately, civil society organizations have all fought the good fight but have not eradicated poverty ... If we stop thinking of the poor as victims or as a burden and start recognizing them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs and value-conscious consumers, a whole new world of opportunity will open up. Four billion poor can be the engine of the next round of global trade and prosperity ... [and] a source of innovations.

Prahalad was spotlighted in a 2006 BusinessWeek profile that offered a compelling case for why the BoP matters to business. More recently, Prahalad looked ahead to the future at the 2007 BOP conference, paying special attention to environmental concerns (an hour-long video clip of his presentation is posted online).

The focus of the best business minds on ending poverty is cause for optimism, not only for their ideas and actions but for their ability to inspire many more of us to lend our own efforts to this great cause.

Can You Relate?

Increasingly in our world, large and small organizations are seeking alliances to create and deliver goods and services. At the same time, the failure rate for corporate alliances is in the range of 60% - 70%. An article in Harvard Business Review (Simple Rules for Making Alliances Work) suggests that too much emphasis is placed on strategic aspects of the alliance and too little on building the relationship between people within the two entities on which the alliances ultimately thrive or flounder. The authors, Jonathan Hughes and Jeff Weiss, suggest that a shift in emphasis is required (see graphic).

In the social sector, the importance of alliances is far greater, as is the desire to focus on the important outcomes. Yet, weaving the fabric of the joint relationship is essential. Rebecca Gajda in the American Journal of Evaluation (Utilizing Collaboration Theory to Evaluate Strategic Alliances) states, “Without a basis for trust and healthy inter-personal connections between people, strategic alliances will not have a solid foundation on which to stand. Collaboration depends upon positive personal relations and effective emotional connections between partners. Trust is only developed between partners when there is time, effort and energy put into the development of an accessible and functioning system for communication, and interpersonal conflict needs to be recognized as normal and even expected as the level of integration and personal involvement increases.”

The ability of people to build relationships and trust is linked to emotional intelligence and the ability to navigate differences. The Center’s work in the Leadership Beyond Boundaries effort is very much about helping individuals enhance their self-awareness and interpersonal skills. This is a growing imperative as we seek to accomplish more through collaborations, alliances, and partnerships. In the end, our ability to make grand cross-institutional relationships work rests on the humble ability of the individuals involved themselves to relate and collaborate.

Liberty in Liberia

The Center for Creative Leadership has been invited by the Government of Liberia to help develop a global leadership initiative for women in government. The effort is being championed by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa's first female head of state, and Tarja Halonen, President of Finland. In her two years in office, President Johnson Sirleaf has already enacted a dramatic transformation in Liberia, a country that has seen its share of horror.

Johnson-Sirleaf has set her presidency as an example of a new kind of leadership. In a speech on leadership at International Institute For Strategic Studies, she stated:

"I pledged to demystify the Presidency, and decentralize the governance system in a spirit of participatory democracy, which will ensure that every segment of our society will become an effective stakeholder, rather than a disinterested bystander, in the running of the country.

"... [a] daunting challenge which our leadership faces in the post- conflict period is getting our war-weary populace to renew their faith and confidence in themselves as a people capable of forging a much better future. This may sound simple, but it is not. In the context of post-conflict leadership, it devolves on us to provide the proper environment that will enable our people to regain their self-confidence. In this regard, we have the responsibility to put in place a governance system based on transparency, accountability, rule of law, and respect for the fundamental human rights of our people, as well as create opportunities for the re-emergence and rekindling of their abundant entrepreneurial skills and aptitudes."

Sirleaf's words are far from empty. The change in Liberia was contrasted by Steve Radelet, a development expert, in the New York Times:

[Before Johnson-Sirleaf] "... the 14-year civil war had killed 270,000 people -- an astonishing one out of every twelve Liberians -- and forced another 250,000 to become refugees. The economy had completely collapsed, with GDP falling by more than 90 percent between 1989 and 1996, one of the largest collapses ever recorded anywhere in the world. Children as young as ten had become pawns in the violence, with warlords abducting them from their families, stuffing them with drugs and arming them with AK-47s."

The situation today is far different, says Radelet, who has been back a dozen times in the past two years:

"Each time I come there are new signs of change: schools and clinics are being reopened, stores are restocked and repainted, the streets are ever more crowded with commercial activity, and electricity and water are being restored (there was no piped water or electricity except generators anywhere in the country for 14 years). Liberia's "control of corruption" index, as measured by the World Bank, registered the second-largest improvement of any country in the world this year."

The change in Liberia is cause for great hope. It signals the dramatic role that leadership can play even in the most fragile of states.